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Sign # 6 : Innovation Like No Other

"Company believes they are so brilliant, so innovative, so smart, so better than other people that they do not have to follow the mundane rules of accounting, corporate governance, or even basic economics. Rules that apply to other people, do not apply to them." (Jennings, 2006)

Not all of the signs apply to reservation programs, and we would say this is one that is less likely to be seen than most of the others we have discussed. There are cases where you have a tribal college president, tribal council member or program director who has brought in grant money or economic development funds year after year. Those individuals are expected to keep doing it and may feel some pressure to fake numbers or exaggerate results. In decades of experience on the reservations, though, we have seen this to happen less often than seems to be the case in corporations. We don't have any good explanation why this is so. It is just our observation.

Not everything is bad on the reservations, although at this point in our discussion of the signs of ethical collapse you might be starting to think we believe that, we don't. In fact, we have found that most often when a college or program consistently has good results in terms of grant money or contracts it is because they have some staff members who are exceptionally good grant writers or some leaders such as the college president or a tribal council member who are visionaries and able to visualize projects that are innovative and worth funding. We aren't saying that there are never grants or proposals with inflated figures, simply that it is not nearly as big a problem, in our experience, as the others we have discussed.

If you have the same, or a different, view, please email us at ericstev@spiritlakeconsulting.com .

We do occasionally hear that line about how the rules don't apply to us because, "those are white men's rules." As we have discussed at length previously, we don't buy that at all. Being ethical and honest is not 'acting white', it is part of our Native American traditions.